111: Chapter 111 The bugs are about to explode on you

Wenren Jingming's rune detection board in his hand almost dropped to the ground.

This doctor, who had squatted in the Hall of Archives for decades and rummaged through the bizarre case files of the Nine Provinces, witnessed for the first time at the bottom of the Seal he was responsible for four portals simultaneously unfolding from the rune nodes.

The blue light portals lit up one after another, each door only a little over a person high, their edges constantly rolling with extremely fine and bright silver-white light patterns, while the interiors of the doors presented four completely different scenes.

The Ministry of Works Cultivators behind him instinctively took several steps back, and someone subconsciously reached out to touch the carving knife at their waist, only to have their wrist pressed down by the person next to them.

Not a single trace of the aura surging from the four portals was something humans could contend with.

Xu Liujing stood by Xie Feng's side, looking up at the several portals slowly rotating on the Seal walkway.

Wenren Jingming finally reacted, suddenly turning to Xie Feng: "Young Master Xie! What is this?"

Xie Feng did not look back, his blind staff tapping on the foundation brick of the Seal beneath his feet, the corners of his mouth slightly curled.

"Don't panic, Dr. Wenren. These doors weren't opened by the enemy."

The portals on the rune nodes began to vibrate.

A new batch of portals quickly unfolded from deep within the rune nodes.

The structure of the second batch of doors was rougher, their edges unstably tearing in the air, looking at a glance like they were opened in a hurry.

The Hedonistic Faction had finally arrived.

Dozens of Shaggai Insects gushed out from their respective portal entrances. They were larger and darker than their peers of the God-Worshiping Faction, and the hisses they made when their mouthparts opened were higher-pitched and more chaotic. Their voices carried no religious fervor, but instead possessed an extremely bizarre excitement on the verge of pleasure.

They came purely to enjoy themselves, hastily crawling out from the alternate entrances to watch the show.

Then they saw those four bright azure mirror surfaces that had been lit for some time.

The few Shaggai Insects of the Hedonistic Faction flying at the very front couldn't brake in time and crashed straight into the nearest door, swallowed up as the blue light flashed once.

That door led to Fomalhaut.

That was the stellar surface of Cthugha's living flame. The few that crashed in didn't even have time to let out a single screech; the moment they fully entered, their dark brown chitinous shells vaporized layer by layer from the outside in, their wings evaporated, their mouthparts melted into a translucent gel, and the remaining half of their torso jumped once over the door before disappearing entirely.

The swarm of insects behind them frantically scattered to both sides, but their formation was completely in disarray. A few on the left were sucked into the third door leading to the deep sea of R'lyeh. This time, the darkness inside the door wriggled slightly. After the few Shaggai Insects were swallowed, there were no bubbles or movements, only the darkness itself slowly churning for a moment, spitting out the crushed shell fragments of those bugs from the door to fall onto the bluestone slabs of the Seal walkway.

The pigeon-sized Shaggai Insects spat out again were less than the size of a table tennis ball.

From the door leading to the underground caves of En-kai came an extremely deep and slow breathing sound, and the airflow seeping from the gap of the door was sticky, forcefully dragging the two Shaggai Insects close to the door edge in, leaving only a few extremely fine insect-foot scratches on the door frame.

A satisfied and lazy purring sound came from inside.

Xie Feng felt that the green color on his body had faded a bit, while his mana value had increased slightly instead.

That batch of Shaggai Insects flying toward the Severn Valley actually flew back out from the door.

It was the group that had just flown in, rolling backward out of the azure mirror surface completely unscathed and whole, frantically hovering in mid-air to search for a direction, crying out even more flustered and chaotic than before.

"Brain Matter. Didn't you say the Hedonistic Faction likes pain? Isn't being crushed by the Great Old Ones painful? Why are there still returns."

Brain Matter rolled over deep in the choroid plexus, its tone dismissive. "They do like pain, but they have to be alive for it. Being directly vaporized and being crushed into a ball by the deep sea doesn't leave any time to feel pain at all. The nervous System of our Insects from Shaggai isn't very strong in perceiving pain to begin with; before it could secrete pleasure hormones, it was gone. What kind of pain is this? This is called waste. As for the God of Depravity..."

It paused, shrinking very uncomfortably against the bottom wall of Xie Feng's cerebral ventricle.

"The pain of the God of Depravity is different. The pain of being crushed by Him can genuinely be felt from beginning to end without a single drop left over, and the Hedonistic Faction doesn't want to try it either."

Xie Feng watched with a grin as the Shaggai Insects flew around in disorder.

"Hehehehe!"

Xu Liujing and Dr. Wenren behind him always felt that Xie Feng didn't look like a good person either.

Following the massive deaths of the Hedonistic Faction, the Shaggai Insects flying out gradually decreased.

Just as Xie Feng was about to have Brain Matter continue tracking the movements of the remaining Shaggai Insect swarm of the Hedonistic Faction, a new Spacetime Gate opened directly in the exact center of that skeletal swamp.

The Spacetime Gate forcefully tore open an extremely unstable blue-green fissure within the deepest skeletal accumulation layer of Shituolin Swamp.

"What are they trying to do?"

On the other side of the portal, the remaining Shaggai Insects began a round of incomprehensible Shaggai language communication through the neural network of their companions before death.

The communication became increasingly radical, increasingly crazy, and increasingly uncontrollable.

In the end, a massive Shaggai Insect emitted a terrifying cry from its three mouths, and all the Shaggai Insects began to run toward a certain position, striving to move something.

As the craziest race in the Universe, the Hedonistic Faction was not to be trifled with either.

Otherwise, back then Nyarlathotep wouldn't have made a special trip to destroy their home planet.

This group of bugs was stuffing the core fuel of their spaceship—fragments of Xada-Hgla—into the Spacetime Gate.

Feeling that foolish aura, Xie Feng instantly realized what these damned things were doing!

"Brain Matter! Didn't you say the Hedonistic Faction is here to enjoy pain? Why did they move Xada-Hgla over? Is this thing something that can be used for pleasure?!" Xie Feng roared almost from the depths of his consciousness.

Brain Matter shrank into an extremely tight and tiny ball in the choroid plexus of his lateral ventricle, its chitinous shell trembling slightly in the cerebrospinal fluid.

"They didn't tell me! I was kicked out of the shared neural network, I didn't know they were going to move Xada-Hgla!"

This group of bugs never intended to return alive. The Hedonistic Faction's goal from the very beginning was to blow Shituolin Swamp up to the sky, and after blowing it up, have Xada-Hgla swallow all the debris into the vortex of the Chaos pristine core.

Even if they didn't complete the scheduled task, if they could successfully bring the Xada-Hgla fragments into the underground of the imperial city, they were willing to swallow these pains and the twisted pleasure that might be contained within them right on the spot.

This was the difference between villains and madmen. Villains had a purpose, but madmen were fine even if they didn't complete their goals; as long as they were happy, that was all that mattered.

The skeletal swamp of Shituolin Swamp began to mutate at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Xie Feng's lesson in Cangyun City let him know that Cthulhu mythos deities could obviously infect and influence the bizarre. (Refer to the bizarre parasitized by the Formless Spawn in Cangyun City.)

And now, Azathoth's only Incarnation fragment was going to pull off something big with Shituolin Swamp.